Coargumenthood and the processing of pronouns

We report three eye-movement experiments and an offline task investigating structural constraints on pronoun resolution in different contexts. This included ‘coargument’ contexts in which a pronoun was the direct object of a verb (‘The surgeon remembered that Jonathan had noticed him’), so-called picture noun phrases (‘The surgeon remembered that Jonathan had a picture of him’) and picture noun phrases with a possessor (‘The surgeon remembered about Jonathan’s picture of him’). In each eye-movement experiment, we observed longer reading times when the nonlocal antecedent (‘the surgeon’) mismatched in stereotypical gender with the pronoun, but little evidence of the gender of the local antecedent (‘Jonathan’) influencing reading times. The offline task suggested readers occasionally interpret pronouns as referring to local antecedents, especially in non-coargument contexts. These results suggest that structural constraints constitute more highly weighted cues to antecedent retrieval than gender congruency during the initial stages of memory retrieval during pronoun resolution

Coreferential Interpretations of Reflexives in Picture Noun Phrases: An Experimental Approach

In English, reflexives (himself) and pronouns (him) have a nearly complementary distribution. That is, in the same structural position, a reflexive and a pronoun will have complementary referential domains: (1) Keni saw himselfi/*j

Binding theory in LTAG

This paper provides a unification-based implementation of Binding Theory (BT) for the English language in the framework of feature-based lexicalized tree-adjoining grammar (LTAG). The grammar presented here does not actually coindex any noun phrases, it merely outputs a set of constraints on co- and contraindexation that may later be processed by a separate anaphora resolution module. It improves on previous work by implementing the full BT rather than just Condition A. The main technical innovation consists in allowing lists to appear as values of semantic features

The Use of Themself to Refer to a Singular Antecedent

The pronouns people use, and the pronouns used to address other people are influential in the formation and perception of gender identity. It is generally accepted in the linguistics literature that English pronouns like he and she are a closed class. But this can prevent individuals who do not identify with these binary identities from having pronouns that properly reflect their gender identity. A work-around that is often pursued is to adopt the use of singular they or themself to avoid gender specification. Historically, the use of they with singular, generic antecedents originated in the fourteenth century, and the use of gender-neutral pronouns in present times is important to help prevent misgendering of individuals. However, due to the fact that the frequent morphologically similar pronoun themselves is associated with a plural third person antecedent, there is some pushback to allow its morphological neighbor themself to refer to a singular subject whose gender is either unspecified or a subject that does not identify with the pronouns “he/him” or “she/her.” Recently, themself has increased in use to combat this plurality issue. It is possible that the believed incorrect grammaticality of its use is influenced by a political agenda that does not believe in the validity of non-binary, gender nonconforming, agender, genderfluid, or other identities. This thesis examines whether native speakers of English express inherent biases that may interfere with their general understanding and perception of the grammaticality of themself in reference to a singular, non-binary antecedent. To this end, I first review the current literature on the topic and then present the results of a socio-psycholinguistic experimental study designed to better understand how college-aged native speakers of English from different socio-political groups process and interpret contexts involving singular themself. This research goes beyond traditional work on pronoun usage by combining sociolinguistic approaches with psycholinguistic experimental methods. Overall, the results of this study suggest that the use of a singular nonbinary reflexive can be normalized and easily comprehensible in our grammar, as it is not a grammatical bias that inhibits acceptance but a social bias against the non-binary identity

Children's Pronoun Interpretation Problems Are Related to Theory of Mind and Inhibition, But Not Working Memory

In several languages, including English and Dutch, children’s acquisition of the interpretation of object pronouns (e.g., him) is delayed compared to that of reflexives (e.g., himself). Various syntactic and pragmatic explanations have been proposed to account for this delay in children’s acquisition of pronoun interpretation. This study aims to provide more insight into this delay by investigating potential cognitive mechanisms underlying this delay. Dutch-speaking children between 6 and 12 years old with autism spectrum disorder (ASD; n = 47), attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD; n = 36) or typical development (TD; n = 38) were tested on their interpretation and production of object pronouns and reflexives and on theory of mind, working memory, and response inhibition. It was found that all three groups of children had difficulty with pronoun interpretation and that their performance on pronoun interpretation was associated with theory of mind and inhibition. These findings support an explanation of object pronoun interpretation in terms of perspective taking, according to which listeners need to consider the speaker’s perspective in order to block coreference between the object pronoun and the subject of the same sentence. Unlike what is predicted by alternative theoretical accounts, performance on pronoun interpretation was not associated with working memory, and the children made virtually no errors in their production of object pronouns. As the difficulties with pronoun interpretation were similar for children with ASD, children with ADHD and typically developing children, this suggests that certain types of perspective taking are unaffected in children with ASD and ADHD

Pronoun processing in post-stroke aphasia:A meta-analytic review of individual data

Pronouns constitute a heterogeneous class of linguistic elements, allowing for expression of referential relationships. Pronouns have an important place in daily communication which speakers and listeners rely heavily on for. Aphasia literature has evidenced that pronoun processing is impaired in people with aphasia (PWA), although explanations underpinning pronoun impairments are mixed. To address this, through a systematic literature review, we identified 42 studies which examined pronoun processing (both production and comprehension) in 474 PWA across 16 different languages. An initial meta-analysis was conducted on the overall data with all PWA and pronoun conditions with an outcome measure indicating whether or not pronoun processing is individually impaired in PWA. Further meta-analytic models were built to compare certain conditions of particular interest (e.g. reflexives vs object pronouns, object vs subject wh-pronouns) in an attempt to further disentangle the explanations behind their difficulty in use. Outputs from our meta-analysis suggest that: (i) a form of pronoun impairment is consistently present in aphasia regardless of aphasia type, fluency or language spoken; (ii) pronoun variables show selectivity in their impairment, for instance, reflexives are better preserved over object pronouns, and the subject-advantage in who-pronouns is language-selective; and (iii) other important linguistic variables that largely predict pronoun impairments include aspects like argument position of subject/object phrases, case marking, cliticization, and the presence of relative clause constructions. These outputs are discussed in relation to neurolinguistic hypotheses that predict pronoun impairments in aphasia

Cognitive modeling of individual variation in reference production and comprehension

A challenge for most theoretical and computational accounts of linguistic reference is the observation that language users vary considerably in their referential choices. Part of the variation observed among and within language users and across tasks may be explained from variation in the cognitive resources available to speakers and listeners. This paper presents a computational model of reference production and comprehension developed within the cognitive architecture ACT-R. Through simulations with this ACT-R model, it is investigated how cognitive constraints interact with linguistic constraints and features of the linguistic discourse in speakers’ production and listeners’ comprehension of referring expressions in specific tasks, and how this interaction may give rise to variation in referential choice. The ACT-R model of reference explains and predicts variation among language users in their referential choices as a result of individual and task-related differences in processing speed and working memory capacity. Because of limitations in their cognitive capacities, speakers sometimes underspecify or overspecify their referring expressions, and listeners sometimes choose incorrect referents or are overly liberal in their interpretation of referring expressions

Shifty behavior: Investigating predicates of personal taste and perspectival anaphors

Many expressions in language are perspective-sensitive, including predicates of personal taste and some anaphoric forms. This paper reports experiments testing sentences like Nora told/heard from Amy about the frightening photograph of her/herself, with two perspective-sensitive elements, to see whether and how identification of the judge of predicates of personal taste relates to identification of the antecedent of pronouns and reflexives in picture-NPs. This allows to us test if they follow a shift-together constraint requiring them to be interpreted relative to the same perspectival center. Our results corroborate earlier findings on the source/perceiver biases of reflexives and pronouns, and reveal a strong preference to interpret the individual who is the source of information as the judge, but do not provide clear evidence for a shift-together constraint on the interpretation of PPTs and pronouns and reflexives in picture-NPs